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Poets sometimes explain themselves at readings when filling in between poems. It can be useful. Bill Cushing does so here in an introduction. His last collection, A Former Life, reviewed here 5/8/2019, had a foreword that was more biographical note and thanks but his introduction here goes further. One might think of some poets who would benefit from doing likewise but perhaps it would ruin the mystique.
By disciplining themselves to use language as efficiently, almost as miserly as possible, poets learn how to extract as much meaning from as few words as possible, Bill says and I like the 'miserly' in there. I'm less enamoured of the definition,
poems are “the history of the human soul,”
which reminds me of Carol Ann Duffy's 'poetry is the music of being human'. I'd say less than that, that poetry is the language poems are written in and a poem is a poem if its author says it is. I'd prefer not to claim too much for it.
In this new book Bill has war poems, several that sympathize with outsiders and a number that are ekphrastic - based on pictures that are provided alongside- and range from rhymed and metrical to unrhymed free verse and varying line lengths. For me the most successful is the 10 lines of Dispatches, with the double meaning of its title about the passing of his parents and,
my
mother’s saboteur
steeped her in dementia
making death more like a cure.
Without wanting to make it a definition of poetry, it's at its best when the language achieves more than its constituent parts.
Also, in The Nature of Snow,
it becomes difficult to tell
whether it floats down
or the world
rises.
Bill's enquiry into the phenomenon is slow-paced and mystical, using line-breaks to enhance its careful thought process.
The pictures chosen as source material are as various as the poems, most memorably Women in Black by Marianne von Werefkin, 1910, which for all the world could have been by Marc Chagall. Ekphrastic poems need to add to their picture rather than equate to them which Bill successfully does in Disappeared Dreams with,
Stealing people’s dreams along the blue avenue,
these shadow babushkas
grip full sacks in their left hand,
holding our reveries like bales of cotton.
War to End batters insistently on only two rhymes in its 13 lines, three of which are 'blood'; Hazardous Material wonders whether import restrictions include such dangerous books as Ovid, Vonnegut and Solzhenitsyn which, of course, at times, they have. Right on Time is possibly the most successful of the poems recognizing the disregarded classes as a subject for reportage. The theme that draws the collection together is this concern for humanity which arrives at an appropriate time as America recovers from the horrors of the Trump presidency and the damage has to be repaired. There wasn't much poetry to be had in his agenda but we can hope that it is being restored now.
